About the Author

Sajjad is a Bangalore based cartographer and programmer, building tools to scale the data team and analyze large spatial data-sets at Mapbox. He has been working closely with OpenStreetMap data and technology for over 6 years.

The life changing lesson.

I’ve a bunch of friends coming home tonight to celebrate the success of the last couple of days, which were the most intense, delightful and tiring days of my life so far. The house is a mess, with clothes thrown here and there, random papers and gadgets all over the place. Yes, I’m just cleaning but I don’t want to push off writing this blog post any more. I should have done this yesterday, but my mind and body just didn’t allow, even now I can feel the warmth in my eyes.

Eight months passed since I moved to Bangalore. At the beginning of this year, I made one of the best decisions in my life, to join HasGeek. I might not be able to put this into flowery words but yes, HasGeek is a bunch of exciting, super exciting and fascinating people. The way each of us work is in itself a new big story.

My first assignment at HasGeek was to join the trip to Goa (yes, that was a work trip), and the first official task which I executed was to drive the car. That was an exciting trip. While we were planning the year ahead, I figured out that Nigel and I might be writing code while rest of the team will be running events. But right now, it feels like the world and words have suddenly changed in front of me. Even though I’m spending just few hours a week for HasGeek, I got the chance to run an event. The Cartonama Workshop. Yes, we did it.

In 2011, right after Android Camp, bunch of us spent the whole night hacking on one thing – build a community around open geographic data and showcase the projects in India – Cartonama.com. Nowhere in the wilderness of my thoughts I could imagine that we would do events around Cartonama.

A week before JSFoo Pune, Kiran asked whether I would be able to take charge of the Cartonama Workshop. Maps are something that fascinates me all the time and I totally wanted to take this up. I remember that day quite clearly. That day marked exactly a month plus a week to the event. The news that Mikel and Schuyler are coming to Bangalore for the workshop was even more exciting.

We wanted to get the website out by the end of that week. Fortunately or unfortunately, I had to spend that weekend in Calicut. And now it’s time to tell you about one of my best friends, Ashima. We spent the days together when she figured out that I’m stressing out so much. We went for long walks on the beach talking about Cartonama and what I wanted to do about it. She’s amazing.

Kiran had couple of ideas how the website should be and I thought it would be best if he takes care of that. Kiran was just busy and didn’t have any bandwidth to get this going. Nothing happened and no sign of the website getting live. Zainab was the biggest pillar of support – and an entirely different woman that I’ve seen all my life. By the end of the week, I realized, getting the website live was just my task, no matter how I can execute it. Nigel, Riju, Aditya and I created the first iteration and we went live. There was something quite different from rest of the events that we have done – the ticket price for the workshop being INR 10,000. That amount will just help us break even with the expenses, only if we sell 30 tickets. So the problem is not to create a good looking website, but to create a website that will sell tickets. Parag did the second iteration and that was fabulous.

Unlike conferences, chances of attracting sponsorship was very weak. The task at hand was quite tricky – to convince people and sell tickets. I was slightly bothered because, two days after going live with the website we couldn’t sell any tickets. I tried to sell tickets all day, let alone near the barber shop. Zainab would say “Take it easy boy, we shall prevail!”. We did prevail. And my heart is beating fast with joy.

Mikel was in the US and Schuyler in Afghanistan. That was some serious distance which was filled by flood of emails between us. We wanted the workshop to be covering the entire technology stack that would help someone to run a location based service. The funnel was put into test again and we discovered many interesting ways to improve it.

Two weeks later, we have sold two tickets. I was getting very nervous, and there were moments when I would just close my eyes trying to stay sane. Patience.

Today, after the event I just don’t want to think about those days anymore. We sold a total of 22 tickets. Not bad.

Some people are just sloppy and intense to deal with. The most inconsistent person I’ve ever seen in my life was that new caterer with whom we signed up. He screwed up everything at the last moment and we switched. When people are sloppy, there is nothing that you can do. Patience.

Billy is another interesting character that I met recently. I can tell you that he is quite a character. Billy is prompt and perfect. His thoughts are sharp and ideas are simple and sensible. Throughout the two days of the workshop, it was Billy, I and Nigel managing the logistics at the venue, while Zainab and Kiran were busy backing us up.

I understood that technology and infrastructure is inconsistent. They wont wait or keep promises. We bumped into issues after issues on day one of the workshop and I felt terrible, but Billy and Nigel was dealing with endless crisis. Patience is the word again.

Internet is something that people care about. They get frustrated every moment when the Internet goes down. There would be sudden chaos. Every nerve in my body was hurting and there were moments when I just wanted to scream out to the people to be patient.

In the middle of the sessions, my eyes would just lock between Mikel’s and Schuyler’s. I just don’t know why, but that gives me a pulse of how everything was going.

At the end of day 1, Billy and I reached home quite late. I was tired and sleepy, but we sat down and started talking about everything that happened that day. I realized that there were too many things that we could’ve done better.

Day 2 was interesting. I was just worried by the thought that whether the participants are enjoying the sessions. Interacting with many of them over the breaks told me that things are going just alright. Sigh of relief. People just loved the way Mikel and Schuyler was taking them through the sessions. They just loved it.

And today, I can proudly say that the workshop wasn’t too bad. I guess it was intense as we promised. The amount and depth of things I learned over the last couple of days cannot be just described. Patience is the key. It is. Always.

Good going Sajjad, congratulations. Its exciting to see that you guys deliver a workshop on such a niche topic and making it success. Yes, 22 is a resounding success!
Time to pat yourself on the back with on hand and pop open the beer with another :)

You have come a really long way and you can only get better and better from here! Welcome to the adventure called life! The horizons are vast and there is much to be reached and chased! So go for all and settle for nothing but the best!